Thursday, May 12, 2016

Moscow Helsinki Group at 40 – Human Rights Activism under Brezhnev and under Putin

Paul
Goble

Staunton, May 12 – This week marks
the 40th anniversary of the Moscow Helsinki Group, a human rights group
that arose as a result of the Helsinki Accords, an east-west agreement that
both Soviet and Russian leaders see as having only geopolitical consequences
but that in fact helped to focus the world’s attention on Moscow’s repressions
then and now.

As Radio Liberty’s Elena
Plyakovskaya points out, many Soviet dissidents did not understand the
possibilities that the Helsinki Accords opened for them and their country.Lyudmila Alekseyeva, the president of the organization
since 1996, was one of them (svoboda.org/content/article/27726691.html).

As she tells Plyakovskaya,
initially, she was disappointed by the Helsinki Accord’s approach to human
rights which enumerated specific ones but was far less comprehensive than the
UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But the physicist Yury Orlov
recognized that Helsinki was enforceable in ways the Declaration was not.

He recognized, Alekseyeva says, that
because Helsinki was “an agreement among states,” it set a standard against
which all could be judged and thus held accountable at least in the
increasingly powerful court of public opinion.That was the genesis of the Moscow Helsinki Group, and it has certainly
achieved far more in that regard than many thought possible then.

As Alekseyeva notes, “the
establishment of the Moscow Helsinki Group did not stop the repressive machine.
Arrests of its members began almost immediately and some were forced to
emigrate,” including Alekseyeva herself.Only two or three of the original members remained at large in the
Soviet Union.

But with the coming of Gorbachev’s
times, the group was able to resume its work under the presidency of Laarisa
Bogoraz. And it was assisted in its work by corresponding organizations in
Lithuania, Georgia and elsewhere in the USSR, working closely with the broader
democratic movement and contributing to the dismantling of the Soviet system.

On this “round” anniversary, not
surprisingly, many are comparing what conditions were like for human rights
activists under the aging but still repressive Leonid Brezhnev and the
increasingly impressive Vladimir Putin.No
one denies that as of now, the situation in Russia is better overall; but the
comparisons with 40 years ago are far from all in favor of today.

Interviewed by Rosbalt, Valery
Borshchev, a long-serving members of the Moscow Helsinki Group, seeks to
provide a balance sheet, noting that the group has achieved a great deal but
that relations between human rights activists and the broader democratic
fraternity have deteriorated (rosbalt.ru/federal/2016/05/12/1513535.html).

When the Moscow
Helsinki Group was established, he says, there was solidarity between human rights
activists and those in the democratic movement. Facing the threat of arrests
and repression, members of each helped each other out even if they disagreed on
this or that situation or action.

But now that level of cooperation
has broken down, in large part because many of the aims of the groups have been
achieved but also because to “slander the opposition is good tone” in much of
Russian society. And that in turn has led to the kind of criticism and
divisions between and among the groups that the authorities have promoted and
exploited.

It has also had a consequence that
Borshchev himself is too polite to mention: many Russians who are committed to
democratic values no longer see the defense of human rights in general as being
at the center of their concerns.And as
a result, the Putin regime has had much less difficulty hijacking some of their
goals under its rubric of “managed democracy.”